CRITICALISSUES:VOLUMEI,ISSUE2

FamilyValues

Test

Ask your typical, proper, New York Times reading citizen
if popular culture and government policies pose a real
threat to family life in America today, and you're likely to
get a response of eyes rolled upwards in exasperation.

It's not that most Americans don't believe the
traditional family of husband, wife and kids is the
preferred household arrangement. In polls taken after the
1992 elections for the major networks, the overwhelming
majority of voters (68 percent) said they want government to
promote traditional rather than nontraditional families. But
- for the typical, proper, New York Times reading American -
one senses this promoting should be done quietly, without an
abundance of enthusiasm. The vehemence of what the press
christened "the two Pats" (Robertson and Buchanan) at the
Republican National Convention is at all costs to be
avoided. So is the spectacle the press made of Vice
President Dan Quayle, when he fired the first salvo of the
family values war by taking television character "Murphy
Brown" to task for glorifying single motherhood to America's
young.

The New York Daily News headline reporting on Quayle's
Murphy Brown speech said most succinctly the sentiment
expressed that day in columns and editorials in newspapers
all over the country: "QUAYLE TO MURPHY BROWN: YOU TRAMP!"
The headline summed up perfectly the major media's two
axioms on the family values movement: (1) It is an ugly and
mean-spirited exercise in bashing single mothers, and (2) It
is a rather ridiculous expense of effort on a wholly
imaginary threat. The existence of such headlines goes a
long way towards explaining why those trying to reinsert
family values into the public debate are often treated with
the exasperation usually reserved for those out canvassing
for Lyndon LaRouche.

Of course, given the coverage of the media (and perhaps
even the sometimes overzealous remarks of defenders of the
traditional family) some exasperation is understandable. But
as a logical response to supporters of profamily policies,
it is simply not sustainable. Despite the headlines of the
Daily News or the editorials of the New York Times, the
family is indeed in trouble.

To say this is not to attack often heroic single moms,
who labor to rear upstanding children. Instead, it is to
warn of the danger posed by those implementing political,
cultural, and educational policies geared towards uprooting
what both tradition and social science point to as the
breeding ground for healthy kids: a home with a mom and a
dad.

The Importance of Family

Over three thousand years ago, the author of Genesis
wrote of the divinely sanctioned order in a man's cleaving
to his wife. The social sciences have been proving the
importance of this cleaving for decades.

By virtually any standard, a child is far, far better off
if he or she lives in a household with both a mother and
father. This is most easily seen on the economic level. Over
half of all children living with a single mother are living
in poverty: a rate five to six times that of kids living
with two parents.[1] In 1991, 60 percent of all poor
families with children were headed by single mothers.

Having an intact household is such a key to economic
success that scholar Lawrence Mead has remarked:

The main challenge [for social policy] is no
longer to expand economic opportunity but to
overcome social weaknesses that stem from the
'post-marital' family and the inability of many
people to get through school. The inequalities
that stem from the workplace are now trivial in
comparison to those stemming from family
structure. What matters for success is less
whether your father was rich or poor than whether
you knew your father at all. [2]

But it's not only in their pocketbooks and checking
accounts that kids from single parent homes suffer. Consider
the following:

An Australian study of over 2,100 adolescents found
that teens from disrupted families had more general health
problems, were more likely to display signs of emotional
problems, and were more likely to be sexually active than
kids from intact families.[3]

In a study of 17,000 children conducted by the National
Institute of Health Statistics, children from broken homes
were found to be 20-30 percent more likely to have an
accident, 40-75 percent more likely to have to repeat a
grade of school, and 70 percent more likely to be expelled
from school.[4]

Child abuse is significantly more likely to occur in
single parent homes than in intact families. In a study of
156 victims of child sexual abuse by the U.S. Department of
Justice, the majority of the children were found to come
from disrupted or single-parent homes. Only 31 percent of
the children lived with both natural parents.[5]

Children from single parent homes are far more likely
to get involved in crime than those growing up in
traditional homes. Robert Rector, a policy analyst for the
Heritage.

Foundation, has found that across the economic spectrum,
children from single-parent households are more involved in
crimes and drugs than kids from two-parent homes. "The most
accurate indicator of future delinquency in children is
whether they are reared in one or two parent homes," says
Rector. Scholar Nicholas Davidson has similar findings. As
Davidson has noted in The Heritage Foundation journal Policy
Review: "Ninety percent of repeat adolescent fire-starters
live in a mother only constellation," as do "75 percent of
adolescent murderers, and 60 percent of rapists."[6]

The statistics showing the critical importance of fathers
in children's lives are so compelling that there is a
consensus among liberals and conservatives on the matter.
The Washington Post, for example, took the lead in attacking
Vice President Quayle for his Murphy Brown remarks in the
spring of 1992. But within a month, it gave prominent space
to a piece by one of its reporters that echoed many of
Quayle's points:

Fatherlessness consigns children to poverty;
children in father-absent households are six times
more likely to be poor than children whose homes
are headed by a father. Anthro-pological studies
have suggested that it may lead boys, in
particular, to become hypermasculine and violence-
prone. It deprives inner-city neighborhoods of the
quasi-policing function played by good family
men...Of all juveniles serving in long-term
correctional facilities, 70 percent did not live
with their fathers while growing up... [7]

Missing Distinctions

If liberal writers and scholars acknowledge these
statistics, they are often reluctant to do so loudly.
Sometimes this is for very understandable reasons.

Given that a traditional home with a loving mom and dad
is the best place for kids to be raised, it remains that we
live in a broken and fallen world, where not all moms and
dads are loving. Better an absent father, perhaps, than a
cruelly abusive one. We must not create a society in which
parents and children are kept from escaping destructive
relationships. And again, we don't want to attack or
demoralize single moms who are laboring valiantly against
the odds. "It's important to remember that many single
parents do an extraordinary job in raising their children
and deserve our full support,"[8] says Cheri Hayes,
executive director of the National Commission on Children,
who is concerned that her findings that kids do best with
both a mother and father may lead to bashing single moms.

Such concerns are valid. But they can be relieved not
only by abandoning all public discussion about values, but
by noting a distinction: It is not single moms that are the
problem, but the policies and culture which encourage single
motherhood, make it seem glamorous or empowering, or a
better economic move than marriage. Such claims are lies.
There is nothing glamorous about single motherhood even in
the wealthiest and most educated of homes; for the typical
single mom, maintaining a mere functioning household is a
Herculean task. And in the overwhelming majority of cases,
single motherhood or fatherhood leads not to empowerment,
but to the powerlessness of poverty and despair.

Despite the odds, many single mothers are doing a heroic
job in raising their kids. Let us applaud them. But let us
also note that it is only the rashest public policy that
seeks to expand the occasions where heroism is required to
achieve the public good. Raising kids is a hard enough task
as it is; being a single parent makes it all the harder.
While many single parents carry off the job admirably, it is
the job of public policy to make the rearing of children
easier and less burdensome, by encouraging and sustaining
families of both a mother and father. For it is in these
families where kids best thrive.

The Revolution In Family Policies

"What's the big deal? Isn't this what public policy is
already doing?" some may ask. The answer is far from an
unhesitating yes. The fact is, an increasing number of
people are rejecting the traditional notion of the family,
and are trying to use culture and public policy to promote
their assertion that the nuclear family is just a social
convention, an invention that might have been good for the
1950s but is now as outdated as DeSotos or Brylcreem.

Gary Bauer, president of the family advocacy group the
Family Research Council, tells of the time a few years ago
when he first realized that the nature of the family was up
for public debate. His story is worth telling at some
length:

I was there, on "Nightline," with a homosexual
couple from Madison, Wisconsin, and a fellow from
Los Angeles who was president of something called
The Family Diversity Project, and we began to
discuss what a family was, and my opponents said
to me, "Well, you know, the most important thing
is whether the people involved have a loving,
caring relationship. If they do have such a
relationship," they said, "that makes them a
family."

And I have to confess to you that, at first
glance, that sounded like a reasonable argument to
me. But then I began to think about it a little
bit, and we came back from a commercial and I
raised a hypothetical issue with the guests I was
on with. I said, "Well, what about three
homosexual men, in a loving, caring, relationship?
Or for that matter, how about a heterosexual man
and two heterosexual women, in a loving, caring,
relationship? Are those families? Should they
get all the rights and privileges that we give to
families, the right to adopt children and the
right to file joint tax returns?"

My opponents said, "Well, of course those are
families. Who are you," they asked, "to inflict
your narrow definition of only two adults involved
in a sexual relationship?"

That night, on "Nightline," we reopened the
polygamy debate in America, and no one seemed to
notice, no one except the individuals that took
the time, that night, to call both my office and
my home, and to leave messages on the answering
machine that were so vile I could not share them
with a mixed audience, messages threatening my
wife and my children. Because I had done what?
Because I suggested that God intended men and
women to live together in stable, monogamous,
hetero-sexual relationships, faithful to each
other, something that, just a few years ago, there
was no argument about in America. [10]

Since Bauer's "Nightline" appearance two years ago, the
argument about the nature of the family has expanded its
scope, forcing its way into nearly every aspect of American
life. Advocates of "alternative families" have moved the
debate from shows like "Nightline" and "Donahue" into our
schools, our courtrooms, our churches, and into the TV
sitcoms, movies, books and newspapers that create our
popular culture.

Consider the following:

Copy editors and style guide writers are working on
ways to make sure words that reflect or reinforce the
traditional family are purged from the language. Robert
Knight, director of the Cultural Studies Project at the
Family Research Council, remarks that editors are
increasingly replacing 'mother' and 'father' with the gender-
neutral 'parent' in textbooks, newspapers, and magazines.
Such editing choices, says Knight, are meant to abolish
readers assumptions that families are traditionally composed
of a man and woman.

Hollywood is increasingly portraying sex outside
marriage as something perfectly natural and ordinary.
According to the Center on Media and Public Affairs, from
the mid-1950s to 1970, 38 percent of TV depictions of
extramarital sex made it seem morally wrong. Since 1970, the
number is 7 percent. Sixty-three percent of the time,
adultery is not disproved of. Experts say such numbers are
helping to destroy traditional notions about the integrity
of the family.

A prominent Washington, D.C. church flouts ecclesial
discipline by permitting two female "godparents" for a child
just entering the Christian community. The ceremony seems
calculated to persuade church members that the traditional
order of the family is something indifferent to children's
welfare, indifferent to the family, and indifferent to God.

Homosexual couples are petitioning employers and judges
to recognize their unions as "marriages," a relationship of
the exact same nature as that enjoyed by a husband and wife.
In Washington, D.C., well-publicized efforts by one such
homosexual couple to be given a marriage license by the city
have so far been refused by the courts. Elsewhere efforts to
mainstream homosexual unions have been more successful. In
Massachusetts, Gov. William Weld has ordered family leave
benefits available to government workers when their spouses
are sick to be offered to them if a homosexual lover is ill
as well. Two bills making their way through Congress could
soon make this practice law: Senate bill S. 574 and House
bill H.R. 1430 seek to provide special rights and privileges
based on "affectional or sexual orientation." Such bills are
widely expected to pave the way for legal recognition of
homosexual "marriages."

New York's highest court ruled on July 6, 1989, in the
case Braschi vs. Stahl Associates that a homosexual couple
living together must be considered a "family" under New
York's rent control regulations.

The New York City public school system has unleashed a
new series of books for its first-grade students, designed
to persuade children that households headed by homosexual
couples are as happy and healthy as those headed by a
husband and wife. The new series, called the "Children of
the Rainbow"curriculum, features books with such titles as
"Heather has Two Mommies," "Daddy's Roommate," and "Gloria
Goes to Gay Pride." The books tell students that "being gay
is just one more kind of love," and "it doesn't matter how
many mommies or daddies your family has."

The Family Research Council says in summation of such
efforts to redefine the family:

With increasing intensity and effectiveness,
organized efforts are being undertaken in city
councils, in courts, in State legislatures, in the
Executive branches at all levels of government,
and in the private sector consciously to redefine
the family. Such redefinitions have not been
confined, or even truly inspired by, efforts to
account for such growing phenomena as single-
parent households, although the problems typically
encountered by such families are frequently
invoked in the cause of family redefinition.
Advocates of family redefinition...[primarily]
include aggressive ideological elements who see in
the traditional family everything from a cellblock
of sexual repression to a stumbling block against
the expansion of the state.[11]

The Broken Home

How much of an effect are such policies and programs
having on family life? It is impossible to definitively
prove any causal relationship, of course; but taken
cumulatively, policies like these appear to have worked a
revolution. Two parent families have undergone a dramatic
decline in the past twenty or thirty years. In 1960, for
example, 9 percent of all children lived in single parent
homes. By 1990, that number had soared to 25 percent. Today,
27. 1 percent of all American children are born into single-
parent homes, a number that is on the rise. In the black
community, that figure is an astounding 68 percent.[12]

Since 1970, the number of one-parent families has more
than doubled.

The traditional family is so threatened today that it
could be on the verge of extinction, say some researchers -
and those not just family value alarmists. Newsweek
magazine, in an article published December 7, 1992 called
"What Traditional Family?," said the idea of a natural or
divinely ordained order in the family was a myth. AndTime
last year devoted a special issue to what the future holds,
"Beyond the Year 2000: What To Expect in the New Millenium."
The article featured scholars predicting that the two-parent
family would soon be going the way of the dinosaurs, killed
off by divorce, serial monogamy, the decline in marriages
among the young, the increasing prevalence of homosexuality.
"It is reasonable to ask whether there will be a family at
all," write theTime authors.

Given the propensity for divorce, the growing
number of adults who choose to remain single, the
declining popularity of having children and the
evaporation of the time families spend together,
another way may eventually evolve. It may be
quicker and more efficient to dispense with family-
based reproduction. Society could then produce its
future generations in institutions that resemble
state-sponsored baby hatcheries...

Time and Newsweek paint a grim picture indeed for the
family in the years ahead. Ironically, however, most
advocates for the traditional family are more hopeful.The
family will continue to be buffeted by forces that are
already in play; the buffeting will get worse. But for those
who believe that the traditional family has an objective
order, instituted and sustained by God and rooted in our
common nature, the predictions of Time and Newsweek are not
to be believed.

Yet one thing is certain. If such predictions do come to
pass, then our entry into the year 2000 should fill us with
dread. Despite the propaganda that says the new, alternative
households are just one more kind of love equal to or better
than the traditional family of mother and father, the end of
the traditional family will give us more of what the
breakdown of the family has already spawned: poverty,
illness, abuse, depression, violence, and decay.

Notes

See Current Population Reports, U.S. Bureau of the
Census, Series P-20, no. 445 and earlier reports.

Lawrence M. Mead, "The New Politics of the New Poverty,"
The Public Interest no. 103 (Spring, 1991): p.10. Quoted
in Free to be Family, The Family Research Council, 1992,
p.16.

"Studies Show Kids better Off With Two Parents," The
Washington Times, May 22, 1992.

Columnist Morton Kondracke notes in his Washington Times
column of May 27, 1992 that very few real single mothers
enjoy the advantages of television's Murphy Brown. Single
women between the ages of 35 and 44 with incomes of more
than $50,000 a year make up only 15,000 of the nation's 10.1
million single moms.

"The State of the American Family 1992," speech given
February 5, 1992.